Store operators often ask themselves: how can I further increase the performance of my online store? One way is to take the delivery of large files such as images and videos away from your own web server and move them to the cloud.
The Smartstore Azure Blob Storage module allows you to do just that. It stores all your store's media files in the "Azure" cloud instead of on the local server hard disk or the Smartstore store database.
Azure BLOB Storage is a highly successful cloud service from Microsoft.
Requirements:
- As an Azure customer, you can store unstructured data as objects or blobs in the cloud.
- As a Smartstore customer, you have the Smartstore Azure plugin included from Premium Edition. The "Microsoft Azure Services" plugin in Smartstore links your Azure BLOB Storage for you as new storage for your media files.
This reduces the load on your Smartstore store server, as the data no longer comes from its storage, but from the Azure cloud. And best of all, store operators don't have to worry about anything apart from the one-off initial setup of an Azure account. Of course, we support you with setup and operation as part of an ongoing support contract or store rental (flat rate).
The advantages of Azure Blob Storage are:
- Almost unlimited capacity: plenty of space for your data, more than on a standard store server.
- Fully scalable: Storage can be easily expanded without the system having to be adapted by technicians.
- Only used storage is paid for. This makes it ideal in the start-up and growth phase of a store project.
- Faster response times thanks to lower latencies,
- Faster data transfer
- Higher data security, reliability
Blob Storage meets the demanding requirements of store operators for high throughput and at the same time offers the necessary scalability to support the storage of many huge media files, as they occur much more frequently thanks to integrated Smartstore video streaming and media-rich Page Builder content pages.
Benefit from greatly reduced global and local access times through geo-redundancy, thanks to Azure's many globally distributed data centers.
This means shorter data paths: with Azure, data is always delivered closer to the user than from your individual store server. Ideal for globalized store projects that want to score with excellent web speed on every continent.
You can find more information about Azure Blob Storage here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/storage/blobs/
The "Microsoft Azure Services" plugin is a proprietary development by SmartStore AG for the Smartstore Shop and is included exclusively from the Smartstore Premium Edition and Premium Flat. https://smartstore.com/en/premium-edition/ and https://smartstore.com/en/premium-edition-flat/